NICOLAE STEINHARDT
(1912 – 1989)

‘Never have more astounding words been uttered than “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”. I tell myself that, if, of all the words of the entire Bible we would only retain these, they would be enough to prove the divine essence of Christianity. […] They are paradoxical, they represent the very mystery of the act of faith […]. I don’t believe and yet I do pray. I do believe and yet I know I don’t believe truly. I do believe, since I call Christ ‘Lord’. And yet I don’t believe as I’m asking Him to help my unbelief. (And whom do I ask to heal me of my unbelief? – the very One I am about to believe in!) Causality is demolished, the law of time succession, as well as all that pertains to matter or the psyche disappears. I believe and don’t believe, at the same time. Doubling. Contradiction. Therefore, uncertainty, anxiety. In poisoning everything, consciousness also poisons our faith, which – when we become aware of it – we turn into unbelief, since, by ‘thinking’ faith we take it outside the ineffable, outside its candour.’
‘But neither rescue, nor hope, nor anything indeed is lost, for I humbly add: help me, as You take into account my human condition so indisputably related to paradox and contradiction. The discrepancy of this text should lead to despair, were it not for this appeal for ‘help’, which – though a tiny grain of salt, an infinitesimal catalyst with huge transmuting powers and unthinkable combinational consequences – calculates the quadrature and transforms the cry of confusion into tears of trust.’

‘My catechesis has now been completed. My baptism, set for the 15th of the month, takes place as planned. Father Mina chooses the moment he considers most appropriate: after we return from ‘out in the air’, when the guards are busier, when the commotion reaches its peak. We must work quickly and act covertly in plain sight. Like Wells’ day-time conspiracy. Something resembling Antonov-Ovseyenko’s invisible manoeuvres. I am not to go out for the walk. (Which is easy, as my boot has pinched my right foot, which now has a suppurating bulge. I didn’t get taken to the infirmary, though I have reported at each morning’s assembly. Doctors Raileanu and Al-G. treat me by applying on the bulge a towel soaked in worm-infested water from the trough. […])
‘I am thus left alone for about a quarter of an hour during the ‘out in the air’ – well, almost alone, as there are a few other people exempted from the walk for various reasons. Empty of clamour and turmoil, the room acquires an even stranger look, like an empty stage on which piles of props lie scattered chaotically. In particular, though, the acoustic difference to the filled room is so striking, that I have the feeling of an absolute silence – silence becomes, as in Cervantes, a performance – and I manage to find some peace and to collect myself to a degree.
‘When the mass of people returns in noisy mayhem, carrying in twos the laundry vat, the trough, the close stool and a ‘water tank’ of sorts, Father Mina, without taking off his coat, rushes to grab the only mug in the room – a red small mug, its enamel chipped, greasy and repulsive – and fills it with wormy water brought in just then in the water tank that he himself carried together with another inmate. The two Greek-Catholic priests and my godfather also come over to my bunk bed. […]
‘Two of the inmates move complicitly before the small door window to block the view. The guard could come any second to check on us, but now the probability is small, as all prisoners are taken out for their walk, each cell by turn, while others are brought back in. Hurriedly – but with that priestly deftness where hastiness doesn’t prevent a clear diction – Father Mina utters all the required words, marks me with the sign of the cross, pours all the water in the small pot over my head and shoulders (the mug is in fact a sort of truncated coffee pot) and baptises me in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. My confession had been brief: baptism washes away all sins. I am reborn out of wormy water and swift spirit.
‘We then move, somewhat calmer, relieved – uncaught thief is honest merchant! – over to one of the Uniate priests’ bed: it is near the close stool and the laundry vat, and there I recite the Orthodox creed as had been established. I renew my promise not to forget that I have been baptised under the seal of ecumenism. Done. Baptism under such circumstances is perfectly valid even without immersion and Chrismation. (If I am ever to get out of prison, I am to seek a priest whose name is given to me by Father Mina, for Chrismation). […]
‘The intense rhythm of cell 18 grips us all forthwith. The Uniate priests are on room duty. Father Mina has a shirt to wash. We are convened by Doctor Al-G.: a few of us sit on the edge of his bed, others on the bed opposite. We are to continue our talks on the speech-act theory, and today is my turn to talk about the act of creation in Proust. We sit clustered together and speak impatiently, in whispers. Many of the inmates, attracted by everything ‘Noica’s group’ does, also gather round. It is clear that, for an hour or two they forget where they are. The abstractions and citations of our discussion spread their nets and hijack these people into cheer, into deceit.
‘Those baptised as infants cannot know, nor can they suspect what baptism means. I find myself assaulted, second after second, by ever-stronger attacks of joy. It is as though, with each battering, the attackers reach higher and strike more avidly, more precisely. It is then true: true that baptism is a holy sacrament, that there are holy sacraments. Otherwise this happiness that surrounds me, envelops me, clothes me, defeats me could not be so unimaginably wondrous and complete. Silence. And a sense of total indifference. Towards everything. And a sweetness – in my mouth, in my veins, in my muscles. And also an acquiescence, the feeling that I could do anything, the drive to forgive everyone, a consenting smile which spreads everywhere and is not merely located on my lips. And a sort of layer of gentle air all around me, an atmosphere resembling that of some of my childhood books. A feeling of absolute certainty. A mescaline-like merging with all things and a complete remoteness into tranquillity. A hand stretched out, a connivance with wisdoms to be guessed.
‘And the novelty: new, I am a new man. Whence has all this freshness and newness come? The Revelation has been confirmed (21:5): “Behold, I make all things new.” Also Paul: “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.” New, but ineffable. I cannot find the right words, just the banal, stale words that I have used habitually.’

‘It was terribly cold in cell 25. The winter of ‘62 had been harsh, with enormous snowdrifts and a shrieking blizzard. […] Soot covers everything in a thick, greasy layer of slimy blackness, continuously expanding, sticky. We are shaking with cold, we are overwhelmed with dirt – and we are hungry. Due to the snow the food supply has probably been discontinued. We are only given a tiny cold portion of mush once a day and at irregular times. We have no more water. […] We’re on the watch for the coming of the mush like confined animals whose food is at the discretion of a scatter-brained master. The mush is a slab of ice made of cornmeal, baked, not boiled.
‘In this shivering, grieving, icy and filthy atmosphere, I manage to be calm. The people in the cell are kind, all of them, and polite. And we don’t take it tragically, but remain gracious with each other, cheery as only in prison people can be – a prefiguration of monastic hesychasm or of heavenly bliss.’
‘I do not see the incarnated Christ, but only an enormous light – white and bright – and I feel unspeakably happy. This light envelopes me from all sides, it is complete happiness, and it ousts everything else. I am submersed in the blinding light, I float inside the light, I am in light and I exult. I know it is going to last forever, it is perpetuum immobile. The light speaks to me: I am, not through words – but through thoughts. I understand it is the Lord and that I am inside the light of Tabor, and I don’t just see it, but I am living inside of it.
‘More than anything I am happy, happy, happy. I am happy and I recognise that I am, and tell myself that. The light seems to be brighter than light and it seems to talk to me and tells me who it is. The dream seems to go on for long, for very long. Happiness not only lasts forever, but increases constantly. If evil is bottomless, so goodness too is boundless. The circle of light widens more and more, and, having enfolded me silkily, joy suddenly changes tactics, it becomes severe, launches at me, falls down over me as in avalanches which – anti-gravitationally – lift me up. Then, again, it acts differently: lovingly, it cradles me. And finally, unforgivingly, it replaces me. I am no more. Yet I am, but so strong, that I can’t recognise myself. (Ever since I have felt so ashamed. Of all my stupid, evil, filthy deeds. Of my moodiness. Of my cunningness. Shame).’


"I arrive in Cluj at around 5 and a half. On the way by train from Gherla I have looked out the window, with that intensity I imagine was in the eyes of the first man to set eyes on God’s newly created world, in the eyes of the death row inmate in the Ballad of Reading Gaol. As from behind bars, I felt Christ close to me, when, my sight still dazed by the ever-bright electric lights, parading before me were orchards, little houses, fences, domestic animals; in each thing, on each spot of land the light of Van Gogh’s paintings pulsates – explosive – with both the calming hue of the day close to the end, and the devastating joy of the first six days; a crazy sensation that the primordial sin has not yet happened.
‘It is a chilly afternoon and the sky is grey. At the station’s stand, my companion, Colonel Ion. T – the ‘Boyar’ – ten years in Siberia, ten years in prison, translator of “If” into Romanian, and currently owner of a few ten-Leu bills – asks me what I want, and my greedy reply is: a coffee! After I drank it, plentifully boosted with the sugar knowingly placed on the table by a sympathetic waiter, we are heading downtown. The Colonel wishes to meet a local friend whom he is trying to find, so that we wander to and fro through this town resembling a miniature Kaiserstadt, full of baroque buildings (a style which best evokes calm and opulence). At every step I have the impression that I am back in 1900, that Europe is a vast ballroom, that people don’t know what fear and anguish are. It seems, truly, that we are in Stadtpark, that statues of Mozart and Johann Strauss can be seen amongst trees and flowers. A brass band seems to be playing on the restaurant’s terrace, pairs are walking leisurely by, the band is playing the most beautiful waltz – the Imperial Waltz.
‘The train to Bucharest we need to take leaves at 10 in the evening. After some time, the Colonel finds his friend at the railway station of all places, and I am left alone. I have no money to take the bus back downtown, but not much time in fact till the train leaves. The euphoria that has seized me since I left the Gherla prison is equable and indifferent. A small shower begins to fall, so I decide to walk around the station. I first go into a food store staring for a long time at groceries and prices. Then, as the rain has stopped, I walk onto a small street. It gets really dark and the air is damp; it almost still feels as though it’s raining frailly and a fragrant wind is blowing. The street I’m on seems to be less travelled. Now it is deserted. Most windows are lit. It isn’t less calm and less blue than in Verlaine’s poem that George Mavrocordat would ask me continually, insatiably, to recite. Blue is not merely a colour, after all, but also a stillness. The little houses are all clean, neat, decorated with flowers, in that pseudo-cubist style of around 1925. But they have something that likens them to coy beings careful with their outer appearance, something that hints at bonnets and white aprons, coffee with milk and butter croissants. And how quiet, comfortable and harmonious I find them to be inside as I glimpse through the windows!
‘I am granted, in a few moments of intense emotion, to understand better than ever before some of the major mysteries of life.
‘First of all, I understand that in this world we are entirely abandoned by God, as Simone Weill has also observed, and that this very abandonment is the supreme symbol of God’s ‘existence’ and love. That is why God, she says, withdraws fully, so that He may allow us to be (otherwise His presence would be consistent with our annihilation), so that He can let us have full freedom and to ensure full merit (or, better still, sense) for our audacious act of faith.
‘Entirely abandoned and destined to live in full dialectic suffering, I understand that I cannot receive rational help from anywhere. Drugs, alcohol, lust, self-comfort through illusions or obsessions are not valid as they place me at the discretion of another and are transient, and worse still they too are conditional to the whims of time which degrades them. There is no definitive and absolute evidence. Theories age worse than people, worse than garments, we can only deal with signs, and signs – it is obvious, Sartre didn’t have to yell it so stridently – signs can be interpreted in two ways: dialectics meets us at every turn. Therefore, I understand I can only rely on some very vague intuitions – certainly not on conclusions, rules, objective certainty etc – but on some exceedingly mysterious directions from a universe I can only feel and guess, from well-hidden depths, from the realm which Ortega deems as being of faiths and not of ideas. […]
[…]I cannot manage to find anything above and beyond the creed formulated by Dostoyevsky which he presents so simply: I believe that there is nothing more beautiful, more profound, more enticing, more reasonable, more manly and more perfect than Christ. Moreover, should someone bring proof that Christ is outside truth and that, in fact, truth is outside Christ, then I would rather remain with Christ than with truth.
‘That is all that I have at hand, a few quotes (from kind people) and a feeling – so feeble, so un-systematic, so fragile. And yet this vague, tiny and humble capital – a little satchel, my only bequest, after all the years in prison – is enough to give me solid certainty and to convey the unbending belief that I know what I need or needn’t do.
‘Uncertainty is the fundamental law of western civilisation and its zodiac sign, and it is also Christianity’s basic condition. But it is joined by those beliefs – unproven on a human, scientific level – which are harder than theories, harder than stones. (We have them from higher authority!). Guided by them, I will always know what to do; through them I can always re-establish my broken connection with God and the accompanying joy. Across the abyss, broadcaster and receiver can communicate in an instant.
‘Under the gentle drizzle, walking along the street, I understand that we ought not to hurt anyone, that any disorder, rudeness, brutality, dispute, annoyance, offence is from the devil. That doing good is the most self-centred principle, as it alone can give us peace and reconciliation with ourselves. That behaving properly and collecting good deeds represents our unique treasure usable at any time (which can’t be confiscated at any police search). That should one find himself, alone, in a prison cell, or even on a hospital bed, or should he find himself without sleep at 2 in the morning (the dreadful hour of alertness) – nothing is more abysmal and closer to hell (to use a strictly egotistic vocabulary) than the remembrance of our ugly, evil, petty deeds. Nothing is worse than the emptiness of unused talents and wasted gifts. That therefore, we ought to do good as long as there is still time, before we reach the state in which we can only be (Ways of being: after death, in prison, on the hospital bed, in despondent – or inescapable – loneliness, in solitary old age. Or, in a more minor key: walking on the street, waiting at the pedestrian crossing, standing admonished before a counter). That by gathering pleasing memories (but not the regret of some fleeting moments of pleasure, for that too is anguish) we ourselves construct paradise, which is nothing else but a sum of good deeds, of noble or heroic actions, of magnanimous conduct – the remembrance of which is an ever-sweet and warm stove, an opportunity for justified and benevolently calm gratitude for having been spared from grimaces and sordidness. That we have no certainty, nor absolute logic, but that we always know what we ought to do – discreetly, we do know. In other words, God is completely absent from the world, but he is also completely present within us, as Kierkegaard said, and as St Bonaventure also mightily proclaimed. God is fundamentally present in our souls and even immediately fathomable.
I leave Cluj serenely, my soul abounding with peace. I have a glimpse into a coming gentleness, a humble moderation which could signify the path to hesychasm.’

© Razvan Porumb 2016